This is where I collect things. Maybe you'd also be interested in reading a few things that I've written, or viewing some of my photos, or even some of my videos. If you're feeling especially voyeuristic, you might even want to look through my links, listening habits, and social connections.
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Video reblogged from SOF Observed with 5 notes
Seriously, don’t let the “Bobby McFerrin” part scare you off — this video is awesome.
“Playing” The Audience
Andy Dayton, Associate Web ProducerNancy just sent around a link to this video of Bobby McFerrin presenting at the 2009 World Science Festival (we’re hoping they’ll also release video of Xavier Le Pichon’s presentation soon). I don’t really know much about McFerrin, but admittedly my impression of him in the past has been cynical — his late-80’s chart-topper “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” was always a little too earnest for my ears. But I was pleasantly surprised to see McFerrin give this simple, fun, and extremely effective demonstration of the universality of the pentatonic scale.
Photo reblogged from WEST BANK SOCIAL CENTER with 6 notes
wbsc:
Check out Heavy Table’s excellent coverage of Thursday night’s 100-Course Meal! Includes some great photos and a complete list of each course, with ratings.
Sitting through 101 courses, however small, has a curious effect on the diner. Each individual component — even if it’s as ordinary as a dollop of yogurt or a piece of spinach — is tasted on its own merits, discussed, evaluated, considered. The 101-Course Meal was, as the organizers explained, really a deconstruction of a 7-course meal; assemble the various components, and you might see something resembling a traditional (if lavish) dinner..
Quote
From the intricate gesturing of a Nina Simone song in sign language, through suited men falling from scaffolding structures, to exhausted dancers rubbing their faces in piles of freshly chopped onions, Nelken is a two-hour rollercoaster ride of profound dance madness.
Video reblogged from fuck yeah, dance! with 2 notes
Pina Bausch’s Rite of Spring. (via fuckyeahdance)
Bausch, a German choreographer, passed away on Tuesday — only days after being diagnosed with cancer. You can read more about her in the Guardian obit:
Perhaps the archetypal Bausch piece is Nelken, created the year after her son’s birth. The stage is covered with pink carnations, through which a near-naked woman wanders, playing an accordion. It is one of the most beautiful images in the dance canon, and if there are security guards with snarling alsatians patrolling the back of the stage, Bausch never promised that everything in the garden was lovely.
Link reblogged from South 12th with 8 notes
Burning pianos, or cellos. →
The link above is to an article in the Utne Reader, but the venerable Star-Tribune also reports “an upright piano was set ablaze at Carleton College in a ‘performance art’ show under the nighttime sky in Northfield.”
(Excellent use of air quotes, incidentally — that’s some great “arts reporting”! It will be “shame” to lose the Strib when it finally goes “bankrupt.”)
Anyway, I link to this because it reminded me of a very touching outdoor performance I once saw out on frozen Medicine Lake, on a Wednesday night a few years ago. An artist — I don’t recall who it was — had assembled a group of people out on the lake, and undertook a performance I am hazy on the details of, other than that it involved a cello, and the cello was apparently to be burned at the completion of the performance.
People stood around politely as the work played out, until the last moment, when a woman ran out of the crowd, I believe shouting something, grabbed up the cello and ran across the lake back to her car, where she peeled off in the manner of a 1970s cop show. And the performance was over.
It took a few minutes for the crowd to work out that the woman’s intervention at the end was not a part of the performance as planned. Apparently, from what I heard, the interloper was a cellist who couldn’t bear to see the instrument destroyed, so intervened.
It became, in the end, a sort of unplanned collaboration between two artists with very different ideas about what art (or artists) might be capable of doing. I have to this day never seen an artist’s performance so brazenly disrupted by another artist on ideological or aesthetic grounds.
Word on the street is that there’s a documentary film in early production stages that features this very burning piano ‘performance.’ More details soon, perhaps?
